


Keeping Warm

by battle_cat



Series: Fury Road Ficlets [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Platonic Cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 11:56:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7221424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's cold and he's already in the War Rig. Totally practical. Nothing to see here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Warm

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: "Keeping the other person warm."

On any other night she would have preferred to sleep on the sand. It’s not like she ever sleeps easy, but under the open stars is usually her best shot. The most like home even though it is really nothing like home at all.

But she’s leaving the Rig behind tomorrow morning. And as much as she tells herself it’s just a machine, it’s a machine that’s kept her safe through dozens of runs. That’s brought her this far on their impossible escape. And it’s a machine that she made her own when it was supposed to be his, and a tiny bit of her can’t help feeling like it _sided_ with her when she turned off-road. And so she climbs up into the cab to spend the last few hours before daylight with it.

Except. He’s already there. Curled up on the back seat, his shoulders hunched up under his jacket.

He startles at the creak when she opens the door and pulls herself up into the driver’s seat, and for a split second she feels a flash of possessiveness (it’s _her_ Rig, after all). But then…what does it matter? He had his own ride before he was captured. He’s probably used to sleeping in it.

He sits up halfway, looking bleary and exhausted. “Can clear out ‘f you want me to,” he mutters.

“Don’t have to,” she says. Because she can’t bear to join the warm huddle of blankets on the sand, where Toast and Dag and Cheedo have nestled in as if they’ve been part of the tribe all their lives. But she finds she somehow doesn’t mind the idea of sharing the cab with him.

She settles down in the driver’s seat, her back against the door and her feet up on the passenger seat. After a moment she hears him lie down again in the back.

She doesn’t really expect to sleep, but she lets her eyes drift out of focus, her shoulders relax a bit. Somehow knowing he’s behind her, would awake at the slightest sound, makes it easier.

It’s cold, and she’s exhausted to her core. She pulls the woven blanket tighter around her, but it only helps a little. As soon as she reminds herself to unclench her jaw, her teeth start chattering. She clenches it again.

She pulls her knees up against her chest, sitting sideways in the driver’s seat, and tries to conserve heat. It barely works.

In the back seat she hears him shift, the creak of his leather jacket as he pulls it tighter around him. When she peeks over the top of the seat she sees he’s awake, and watching her.

“’S cold,” he mutters.

“Yeah.”

“Could, uh.” His gaze skitters away from her. “Could come back here. ‘F you want. Would be…practical.”

He’s right, and she suddenly discovers she is out of energy to argue. She climbs into the back of the cab.

It takes a few tries to find a position they can both tolerate. The seat is not nearly deep enough to lie side-by-side and she’s not willing to lie on top of him or sit between his legs. Eventually he wedges himself up against the corner of the Rig and beckons for her to sit next to him.

She scoots in cautiously until her hip is pressed against his. Helps him pull the blanket over both their bodies. He arranges his jacket so she’s sort of…tucked inside one side of it, and she ends up leaning against the rough cloth of his shirt (gods, it’s filthy), close enough to feel his breathing and the shift of muscles in his chest and stomach.

He’s warm. Gods, he’s warm. Her own body feels like steel against him, hard and unyielding, wound to its snapping point.

His arm is on the back of the seat. After a moment he settles it cautiously around her shoulders. She flinches, and she can feel him tense to remove it, and she says “Don’t,” without really meaning to.

“Mm?” She can feel him holding himself on alert, not sure what she meant but looking for a cue.

“You can…keep your arm there.”

“Mm.” She feels him relax behind her: hand, shoulder, pecs.

It takes her much longer to do the same. But he’s warm, and his breath is steady and even against her back, and it seems there is still some part of her attuned to simple, animal comforts.

Eventually she wills herself into some semblance of relaxing against him. At some point it occurs to her that his shoulder is the right height to rest her head on, and so she does, and he doesn’t tell her to move it. His hand curls gently around her waist, and she doesn’t tell him to move that either.

They don’t speak. She isn’t sleeping, and she doesn’t think from the rhythm of his breathing that he is either. But, sitting like this, there’s something slightly less unbearable about the desolate white plains stretching out below them, and the Green Place that isn’t green anymore, and the terror clawing at the back of her throat, howling that she made a terrible mistake and she’s sending them all to a slow death somewhere out on the unending salt. Those things are all still there, she knows, but somehow it’s a tiny bit easier to hold them at bay.

He’d already said he wasn’t going with them, and she’d chided herself for ever expecting anything different. But if he’ll be gone in the morning that means there is no risk, no expectation of this moment meaning anything more than two people with one jacket and one blanket between them doing the most practical thing on a cold night.

At least, that’s what she tells herself as she tucks her forehead against the hollow of his shoulder and lets her eyes drift closed.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Keeping Warm fanArt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13950084) by [confucamus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/confucamus/pseuds/confucamus)




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